Slackbot is an AI agent now

Slackbot, the automated assistant baked into the Salesforce-owned company messaging platform Slack, is coming into a brand new period as an AI agent. And Salesforce CTO Parker Harris hopes it will likely be as viral as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

The cloud software program big rolled out the brand new model of Slackbot on Tuesday. This new AI agent model of Slackbot, which is usually accessible for Enterprise+ and Enterprise+ prospects, can discover info, draft emails, and schedule conferences, amongst different issues, all throughout the Slack platform, in accordance with the corporate. It may possibly additionally hook up with, and work together with, different enterprise merchandise like Microsoft Groups and Google Drive to seek out info if it’s granted permission. This permits customers to work throughout a handful of various frequent enterprise functions with out leaving Slack.

Salesforce, and its enterprise software program opponents, are pouring assets into the event of AI merchandise in a bid to protect, and even develop, their market share. The reworked Slackbot, which was initially introduced at Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference in October, is only one piece of Salesforce’s enterprise AI-heavy product plan.

Harris instructed TechCrunch the next-gen Slackbot is totally totally different than what existed earlier than; the corporate stored the identify as a result of it’s already well-known.

Harris added that Slack doesn’t typically launch new options. As an alternative, Slack sometimes points updates to the product to assist drive adoption, which makes Slackbot fairly totally different from previous product updates.

“It’s an agent, it’s a tremendous agent that’s your worker agent,” Harris mentioned. “It’s powered by generative AI, and it’s one thing that’s extremely crafted and extremely curated to be an agentic expertise that staff and customers love.”

Salesforce assessments new merchandise, like Slackbot, with its staff for months earlier than they launch them — Harris joked they prefer to drink their very own champagne first. Slackbot has been probably the most adopted inside device they’ve launched, he mentioned.

“Simply seeing the sheer lively person depend is a good signal we have now hit on product-market-fit,” Harris mentioned about inside adoption. “Adopted not mandated in firms.”

That is only the start of Slackbot’s second bloom as an AI agent, Harris mentioned. Sooner or later, they need Slackbot to maneuver past only a text-based agent solely in Slack. He mentioned they need to add voice capabilities sooner or later and the power for Slackbot to browse the web alongside its customers.

“I’m very assured that investing in Slackbot just isn’t solely good for Slack, it will likely be extremely good for the complete firm,” Harris mentioned.